Was Saddam Rational?

For some damn assignment I regret taking, I have been reading a book called Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi. One of the authors' contentions is that Saddam Hussein was a reckless but essentially rational dictator who tried (successfully, with two glaring exceptions) to calculate the risks every time he made a major move. This is an idea that has surfaced here and there. Karen Kwiatkowski made a similar argument in a comment about the Iraq debate between Brink Lindsey and John Mueller in Reason a while back:

On recklessness, Iraq's behavior in the past has been not reckless, but extremely cautious, with Saddam always seeking to assure the outcome before committing forces. That's why he broached the subject of the Kuwait invasion with April Glaspy [sic.] in 1990 (before he did it), and why his assessment of his war against Iran in the 1980s would work. In both cases, he thought the U.S. was on his side (and in fact we indicated we were). Dictators also need wars to maintain and fuel crisis mode management and media control. Iraq has not been reckless in projecting power, but actually quite rational and thoughtful. That Saddam mistakes our messages doesn't make him irrational, just part of a larger global crowd trying to figure out what the U.S. really wants.

I shouldn't have to note that calling Saddam rational isn't the same as saying he's a nice guy. Anyway, the two glaring exceptions I mention above were the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War. I don't know whether to include this year's war as well, because I am not sure there is anything Saddam could have done to prevent it. Throughout the last two years, he responded to various stimuli in fairly predictable ways; other than fleeing the country it's not really clear there is any step he could have taken to prevent his own downfall. If there wasn't anything he could have done, will that make any difference for American efforts to get compliance from other state actors (since the obvious motivation in these cases is the promise that if you do what the U.S. wants you won't be punished)?

Comments

[Derek Lund]

He almost sounds rational, but consider his battle plan for the first gulf war. I have read he indeented to capture some of our troops and tie them to tanks so we would not shoot at them. Doest that sound rational? Backing down from Quaite would have been painful, but not nearlly as bad as getting his ass kicked and almost overthown. A rational man would have backed off. He did not. He could have come back 4 years later with nukes in tow and we would not have been able to stop him.

[tim]

Good point, Derek. Keep in mind that tying captured enemies to vehicles was a tactic used by Humungous in The Road Warrior, and one of that movie's central points is that Humungous is the most rational figure-in terms of knowing what he wants and the simplest route to getting it-in the whole picture.

Back to the point: Saddam's famously bad and unrealistic battle plans are a strong argument for his being an idiot, but not necessarily for his being irrational. One thing that I think I knew but hadn't really internalized until I read the book is that Saddam never served a single minute in the armed forces. And another thing that reading the book really brought back to me was the many ways he tried to weasel out of Kuwait after seeing the way the U.S. (and, lest we forget, France, the USSR and countless others) reacted to the invasion. For about two weeks in August of 1990, Iraq made a series of face-saving gestures that involved leaving Kuwait. I'd estimate the probability that, had those gestures been accepted, he would have tried to worm out of them, at close to 100 percent. But there is plenty of evidence that he realized how hopeless his military situation was. His decision to fight the MOAB was really based on the sense that he had no choice.

There's also the example of the Iran-Iraq war. There was ample reason to believe Iraq would succeed quickly in 1980, but when that didn't happen, Saddam spent much of the next eight years trying to get out of it. From 1982 until Iraq turned the tide (sort of) in 1987, it was the Ayatollah (an irrational leader in anybody's book) who kept up the pressure-despite Iraq's numerous advantages, which included almost total air supremacy.

The 2003 battle plan seems either non-existent or incomprehensible, but assume for the sake of argument that Saddam really did plan to withdraw into Baghdad with a cadre of reliables, and turn the city into Stalingrad-with the goal of rallying sympathy for the Iraqis and disgust for the Americans. It's an evil plan (because it involves sacrificing civilians for political gain) and an unrealistic one (underestimating America's stomach for a protracted fight and wildly overestimating his own cadres' reliability), but bad guesses don't necessarily make you irrational. In fact, what may have broken whatever fighting spirit the defenders of Baghdad had was a totally rational decision by Saddam: Rather than stay and become a martyr, he took the last train to Clarksville.

[tim]

"'I don't think it means what you think it means.'
I think you have less of a point than you think you do."

Who are you quoting here?

[Todd Fletcher]

Saddam had the same kind of rationality Hitler had, that is, cold calculations in the service of goals that were manifestly insane. Therefore, the careful calculations both typically made often failed, at least after a certain excessive meglo-mania had set in. In a way, these kinds of maniacs are a self-correcting phenomena, too bad lots of innocent by-standers end up dying before they overreach and destroy themselves.

I think if Saddam had turned over his WMOD, or proven they had been destroyed, he would at least have made it much more difficult for the US to go to war - if only for reasons of domestic opinion.

But I think that would have critically undermined him in his own country, where the appearence of invincibility is essential to maintaining the postion of top dog.

[Sean]

"I don't think it means what you think it means."
I think you have less of a point than you think you do. If you take into account Saddam's level of deductive reasoning and sociopathic tendencies, of course he's rational.
Want to test your chemical weapons? Kurds collaborating with the enemy? Well, the solution is obvious.
Kurds encroaching on your oil? Got a large, restless army? Again, it's all too easy to kill two birds with one stone.
Meanwhile, my reaction to a friend coming to the above conclusions would be: "What!? Are you friggin nuts!?"

The problem of "irrational actors" when it comes to, say, internatoinal policy is not that they're irrational, but that they're operating at a completely different level. Given Saddam's history, could you be sure he could correctly estimate international reactions? He was often wrong on that.

Basically, I think you're pointing to something that's not as surprising as you make it out to be.

[Robert Speirs]

Mandy Patinkin in "The Princess Bride"

[tim]

I'm more into the Yentl-era Patinkin. After Alien Nation, I don't know, I tuned out...

[Joe L.]

Rationality requires transitively ordered preferences, and assignment of probabilities for their achievement. It also, in later assessments, requires a re-examination of these probabilities, in light of experience.
I'm not sure Saddam WAS rational in this sense. yes, he had a list of priorities. And yes, he assigned some probability of their occurrence, no doubt. But, did he have the real capacity to update his probabilities? Shooting people who bring you bad news is NOT a way of securing accurate data about the outer world.
So, did he have the capability of reassessing his options and re-ordering them if he didn't have updated and accurate information? So, was he rational? Either in his decision-making process, "I'll shoot the bearers of bad news." or in the decisions he made?

[Mr. Nosuch]

Well, from looking at his Amazon Wishlist, he seems pretty rational.

[hopeless geek]

"That word you keep saying, I don't think it means what you think it means."

[Craig]

You all have good points in trying to figure out whether or not not Saddam it rational, or irrational. Also, we have to look at who's standards we are comparting his actions. I think by the U.S. standards, he is absolutely irrational. Rational people simply do not piss off the most powerful country to ever live.

[Spikol Liz]

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DATE: 01/21/2004 04:56:25
Describing is not knowing.